Installation

You need Node version 0.6.2 or later installed on your system. Node is extremely easy to install and has a small footprint, and is really awesome otherwise too, so just do it.

Once you have Node installed:

npm install testem -g

This will install the testem executable globally on your system.

Usage

As stated before, Testem supports two use cases: test-driven-development and continuous integration. Let's go over each one.

Development Mode

The simplest way to use Testem, in the TDD spirit, is to start in an empty directory and run the command

testem

You will see a terminal-based interface which looks like this

Now open your browser and go to the specified URL. You should now see

We see 0/0 for tests because at this point we haven't written any code, but as we write them, Testem will pickup any .js files
that were added, include them, and if there are tests, run them automatically. So let's first write hello_spec.js in the spirit of "test first"(written in Jasmine)

Testem should automatically pickup the new files you've added and also any changes that you make to them, and rerun the tests. The test fails as we'd expect. Now we implement the spec like so in hello.js

function hello(){
return "hello world";
}

So you should now see

Using the Text User Interface

In development mode, Testem has a text-based graphical user interface which uses keyboard-based controls. Here is a list of the control keys

ENTER : Run the tests

q : Quit

← LEFT ARROW : Move to the next browser tab on the left

→ RIGHT ARROW : Move to the next browser tab on the right

TAB : switch the target text panel between the top and bottom halves of the split panel (if a split is present)

↑ UP ARROW : scroll up in the target text panel

↓ DOWN ARROW : scroll down in the target text panel

SPACE : page down in the target text panel

b : page up in the target text panel

d : half a page down target text panel

u : half a page up target text panel

Command line options

To see all command line options do

testem --help

Continuous Integration Mode

To use Testem for continuous integration you'd do

testem ci

In CI mode, Testem runs your tests on all the browsers that are available on the system one after another. To find out what browsers are currently available - those that Testem knows about and can make use of

Command line options

To see all command line options for CI, do

testem ci --help

Configuration File

For the simplest Javascript projects, the TDD workflow described above will work fine, but there are times when you want
to structure your sources files into separate directories, or want to have finer control over what files to include, this calls for the testem.json configuration file (you can also alternatively use the YAML format with a testem.yml file). It looks like this

This displays the current list of launchers that are available. Launchers can launch either a browser or a custom process - as shown in the "Type" column. Custom launchers can be defined to launch custom processes. The "CI" column indicates the launchers which will be automatically launch in CI-mode. Similarly, the "Dev" column those that will automatically launch in Dev-mode.

Running Tests in Node and Custom Process Launchers

To run tests in Node you need to create a custom launcher which launchs a process which will run your tests: this is nice because it means you can use any test framework - or lack thereof. For example, to make a launcher that runs mocha tests, you would write the following in the config file testem.json

"launchers": {
"Mocha": {
"command": "mocha tests/*_tests.js"
}
}

When you run testem, it will auto-launch the mocha process based on the specified command every time the tests are run. It will display the stdout and well as the stderr of the process inside of the "Mocha" tab in the UI. It will base the pass/fail status on the exit code of the process. In fact, because Testem can launch any arbitrary process for you, you could very well be using it to run programs in other languages.

Processes with TAP Output

If your process outputs test results in TAP format, you can tell that to testem via the protocol property. For example

When this is done, Testem will read in the process' stdout and parse it as TAP, and then display the test results in Testem's normal format. It will also hide the process' stdout output from the console log panel, although it will still display the stderr.

PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a Webkit-based headless browser. It's fast and it's awesome! Testem will pick it up if you have PhantomJS installed in your system and the phantomjs executable is in your path. Do a

testem launchers

And verify that it's in the list.

Preprocessors (Coffeescript, LESS, Sass, Browserify, etc)

If you need to run a preprocessor, or, indeed any shell command before the start of the tests, use the before_tests option, such as

"before_tests": "coffee -c *.coffee"

And Testem will run it before each test run. For file watching, you may still use the src_files option

"src_files": [
"*.coffee"
]

But, since you want to be serving the .js files that are generated and not the .coffee files, you want to specify the serve_files option to tell it that

"serve_files": [
"*.js"
]

Testem will throw up a big ol' error dialog if the preprocessor command exits with an error code, so code checkers like jshint can used here as well.

If you need to run a command after your tests have completed (such as removing compiled .js files), use the after_tests option.

"after_tests": "rm *.js"

However, if you would prefer simply to clean up when Testem exits, you can use the on_exit option.

Custom Routes

Sometimes you may want to re-map a URL to a different directory on the file system. Maybe you have the following file structure:

+ src
+ hello.js
+ tests.js
+ css
+ styles.css
+ public
tests.html

Let's say you want to serve tests.html at the top level url '/tests.html', all the Javascripts under '/js' and all the css under '/css' you can use the "routes" option to do that

DIY: Use Any Test Framework

If you want to use Testem with a test framework that's not supported out of the box, you can write your own custom test framework adapter. See customAdapter.js for an example of how to write a custom adapter.

Then, to use it, in your config file simply set

"framework": "custom"

And then make sure you include the adapter code in your test suite and you are ready to go. Here for the full example.

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.